I originally wasn’t going to do it, because I figured I was flat-out just reading an acceptable number of Australian authors of any gender in 2013. Last year, 19 out of 140 books were written by Australians, a piddling 13.57%. Shameful.

But my good friend Mel at Subversive Reader has been pursuing the challenge with great dedication, so I got curious and started reading the hash tag. And then I started reading the reviews. And then I thought, what the hell, this project has given me lots of ideas for what to read next — I might as well throw my hat in the ring.

(Yes, and if Mel jumped off a cliff often enough, I might start thinking there was something in that, too.)

Time constraints mean that I don’t review many individual books any more, but I’m going to make more of an effort. Therefore, I present two Sydney-based crime novels by Australian women!

Okay, I’m cheating here. I read The Old School in November 2012, while I was travelling in America. I had grabbed a paperback to read while planes were taking off and landing, figuring that if I didn’t like it, I could leave it behind for some passenger or flight attendant who might enjoy it more.

Not only did I like The Old School, but it’s still on my mind three months later. It had a vivid sense of time and place, and a really fantastic heroine in Detective Nhu “Ned” Kelly.

Time and place: Sydney, 1992. Bill Clinton is in the White House. The High Court has just overturned the legal fiction of terra nullius with the Mabo ruling, establishing precedent for Aborigianal land rights.

The heroine: Ned is the daughter of an Irish-Australian and a Vietnamese woman he met while serving in the war. Her parents were murdered when she was young, and she and her sister were raised by their eccentric paternal aunt, who doesn’t make a secret of the fact she wishes her nieces were just a little more, you know, white. As an adult, Ned is career-minded, ambitious and somewhat resentful of senior officers’ expectation that she be their token minority (a role that falls by the wayside when she reveals she speaks no Vietnamese). (So good was the portrayal of the pressures and micro-aggressions Ned faces that I was really shocked to learn that the author is in fact white.)

This is the status quo when the bodies of two women are discovered in the foundation of a building that Ned’s father constructed in the late ’70s. One was an Aboriginal activist whose inability to swallow bullshit and play nice with the patriarchy earned her a lot of enemies. The other was a Vietnamese refugee who may have had links with the Viet Cong.

Probably the weakest link in the novel is that Ned wasn’t transferred to other duties right away, but it does make sense that she would want to prove herself, and that her mentor would give her the chance.

Despite that, it’s a fantastic, intricate mystery that covers espionage and war crimes in Vietnam, police abuse of Aborigines in Sydney, and the way past sins can still damage families. And the culture, the awkward fumbling steps towards inclusivity that in my family we called political correctness, is portrayed vividly. Late in the book, events take place with Paul Keating’s famous Redfern speech as the backdrop, assimilating all the themes beautifully. I was really excited to learn that there’s going to be a second book about Ned.

It was Mel who put me onto Howell with her review of the third novel in the series, Cold Justice. I used to be able to read series out of order, but somehow I just can’t do it any more … but luckily (from every perspective except that of my bank account) Amazon has the first book in the series in Kindle format for $5.32. And having finished it, I’m now sternly telling myself that buying book 2 for $12.88 is stupid, when I can get the next two books from the library. I just have to brave the heat … and the wrath of Terry Deary. Yeah, that’ll keep me up at night. (Here, have a rebuttal as a palate cleanser.)

Anyway, I totally am going to brave the heat as soon as I’ve finished my lunch, so obviously I enjoyed Frantic. Like The Old School, it’s a police procedural set in Sydney with predominantly female protagonists. After that, they diverge.

For one thing, Frantic occupies a Sydney which is much whiter and more middle class than The Old School. The detective, Ella Marconi, is presumably of Italian descent, but everyone else appears to be of Anglo-Saxon background. It’s almost jarring, especially as Frantic was written and set in 2007.

Additionally, it has two heroines. The narrative is divided between Ella Marconi, a police detective whose inability to play politics stands between her and promotion, and Sophie Phillips, a paramedic. Sophie is a competent, clever person, unable to understand why her husband, a police officer, has become uncommunicative, even hostile. In the space of a few days, a series of bank robberies are linked to the police, husband is shot and her ten-month-old son is kidnapped.

Splitting the narrative gives us Sophie’s highly emotional, increasingly irrational response, and also Ella’s more distant perspective. I came out feeling like I didn’t know Ella as well as I knew Sophie, but I understand the series features a different set of paramedics in each book, but Ella is a constant. I’m hoping this means that Ella’s character will unfold over time.

I like the conceit of involving paramedics in the story, because it meant even the routine moments of Sophie’s life and job were fraught with tension. Howell is a former paramedic herself, and while I can’t judge as to accuracy, it certainly felt realistic. (At the same time, I think Howell was right to avoid anything was clichéd as a crime-fighting ambo.) We got to see crime scenes from several perspectives, while the two women’s different and sometimes conflicting agendas meant we got to have fun with unreliable narrators.

I have to confess that, even though it was a fantastic, pacy read, Frantic is not as layered or thoughtful as The Old School. But if you enjoy a solid procedural, and I do, it’s an entertaining way to spend a few train journeys.

You know, I really don’t think it was necessary for WordPress to become more like Tumblr.

Anyway, I am aiming to blog more frequently this year, while also meeting my various other commitments. It’s totally doable. Really.

Accordingly, my monthly list of books will be going here instead of on Dreamwidth. That way we’re guaranteed at least one post a month, and I swear I’ll get back to the Malory Towers posts as soon as real life stops making demands of me. Why, I just spent the last half hour staring at my cat as he slept under a bench in the backyard! YOU HAVE NO IDEA OF THE PRESSURES THAT I’M UNDER!

The books I read last month:

Title

Author

Genre

Aussie?

Love and Romanpunk

Tansy Rayner Roberts

Fantasy

Australian

The Sacred Art of Stealing

Christopher Brookmyre

Crime

Captain Marvel – Volume 1: In Pursuit of Flight

Kelly Sue Deconnick

Comic

Thief of Lives

Lucy Sussex

Fantasy

Australian

Losers in Space

John Barnes

YA SF

Furious Improvisation: How the WPA and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art Out of Desperate Times

Susan Quinn

History

For the Thrill of it: Leopold, Loeb and the Murder that Shocked America

Simon Baatz

True crime

One Con Glory

Sarah Kuhn

Romance

For Darkness Shows the Stars

Diana Peterfreund

YA SF

Among the Unnamed Stars

Diana Peterfreund

…Okay, I did not expect it to past like that! But hey, look how organised it all is! I wonder why it didn’t get the genre of the last book?

Anyway, this was a pretty good month! Two Australian authors! A nice range of genres! Some really good books!

Particular recommendations:

I already blogged about Love and Romanpunk by Tansy Rayner Roberts;

The Sacred Art of Stealing was the selection for my RL book club, and it was amazing. Scottish crime/farce/social commentary/comedy that rewards close attention — I had to go back and read the first few chapters when I was finished — and was generally fun to read. And it came in the middle of a series! Well, it’s the middle book in a trilogy that forms part of a loose series. I didn’t even hate the phonetic dialogue, which is usually a major turn-off for me.

Captain Marvel vol 1: In Pursuit of Flight – lots of people have been talking the new Captain Marvel series up since it started, and it turned out I’d read a lot of this via Tumblr posts. I know nothing at all about the previous Captain Marvel mythos, or about Carol Danvers, the character who takes on the title at the beginning of the story, but I really enjoyed this. It kept returning to the role of female soldiers and aviators in the 20th century, with a neat twist and a forgivable villain, and loads and loads of different kinds of women in different kinds of roles.

I enjoy theatrical history, social history and books about the Depression, so Furious Improvisation was pretty much a winner for me. (It makes me a bit sad that most of the popular histories of the Depression are American, but that’s the way it goes, y’know?) It’s a well-written look at the period of the New Deal, and the unpopular choice to direct government funds towards live theater. Because actors, stagehands, directors, they all need to eat too, y’know? And along the way, some terrible theatre is produced, as well as some groundbreaking, game-changing stuff like Orson Welles’ Voodoo Macbeth, the first professional production of Shakespeare with an all-black cast. (Things which should also be the subject of a book in their own right!)

For Darkness Shows the Stars is a retelling of Jane Austen’s Persuasion as YA science fiction. Set in New Zealand, no less, although I didn’t pick that up until I read the prequel novella, Among the Unnamed Stars, even though I did notice that the heroine is a woman of colour. I thought the transplant worked remarkably well, taking the basic situation of Persuasion — a young woman in a position of privilege turns down a chance to make a new life with a man from a lower class, and instead takes on the duties her feckless relatives ignore, and putting it in a post-dystopic environment. (I say post-dystopic because it’s a major theme that the issues faced by earlier generations are falling away, and a new industrial revolution is taking place.) I appreciated the many riffs on Austen, but I also liked the book in its own right.

Less to my taste:

Thief of Lives is a slightly disjointed short story collection. I liked the stories individually, but they didn’t work for me together. I was amused to realise that Lucy Sussex is also the editor of She’s Fantastical!, an anthology of feminist SF that I read in my early teens. I distinctly remember finishing that book and thinking, “Wow, this feminism business is complicated, and also really weird.” I should go back and give it another look sometime.

For the Thrill of It was a good overview of the Leopold and Loeb murders, but it committed an unforgivable crime against non-fiction: it put thoughts and feelings into the heads of historical figures. The extensive footnotes and citations make me think most of it had a basis in fact, but it’s a style that I really hate in non-fiction.

One Con Glory is an indie novel about a cranky fangirl having a close encounter with the leading man in a TV series based on her favourite Marvel comic. It had its moments, but didn’t really work for me, mostly because it’s full of fannish types that I know and detest. I avoid those people like the plague in real life; I don’t enjoy having them play major roles in the fiction I read! Most disappointing of all, I found myself actively disliking the heroine, and not just because she dissed Kathryn Janeway. I usually like a bit of crankiness in my fictional ladies, but here I felt it was frequently unjustified, and not balanced out by any other moods. And the other female characters were pretty one-dimensional.

So that was January! February is … well, it’s happening. I’m reading books. Books are being read. And someone needs to come and forcibly detach my Amazon account from my credit card, because I seriously need to stop buying Kindle books.